


Riddles in the dark

by historymiss



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 13:34:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21321001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: Harrow faces the first test at Canaan House, and fails.For the ever lovely Lindsay!
Comments: 2
Kudos: 46





	Riddles in the dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [necromanticatheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/necromanticatheart/gifts).

Harrow never expected this to be easy- it’s a trial, after all, and she knows better than anyone that everything has its price- but she thought she had prepared. She had expected to be ready for every challenge Canaan House could devise. While Griddle had been running laps and swinging around that ancient rapier with an expression of such extreme distaste that even her paint couldn’t hide it, Harrow had been doing what she did best. She had been _studying_. 

There’s nobody else left to teach her, after all. She surpassed her aunts long ago. So Harrow had used the key that hung around her father’s blotched and rotting neck and pondered many a tome of forgotten nercromantic lore. 

It is, all of it, utterly useless in the face of this first test.

Again, Harrow feels the strain on her soul lessen as another skeleton is dashed to pieces, invisibly and impossibly. Again, she rushes to the second room as soon as the door between the two chambers opens to see if she can catch something, anything of what is destroying them. Her mind is dizzy with possibilities (her mind is, at this point, just dizzy). 

Mechanisms in the walls? Struts of bone built between floor and ceiling remain intact from one test to the next until she introduces a skeleton. Then they are all destroyed utterly. Pressure traps? That doesn’t seem likely. It’s a test of necromantic ability, not some physical obstacle course for meatheads like Griddle. Some kind of ward? There’s nothing to indicate such, no markings in the floor or ceiling, no delicate embedding of bone or trace of cremains to show Harrow what she needs to unpick.

Harrow thinks of Sextus Palamedes’ gray, assessing eyes, bright behind his glasses. The way Lady Abigail had run a finger down a peeling patch of wallpaper and sniffed her fingers with an air of recognition. She wipes blood from her nose, under her eyes, and tries again. 

Another skeleton. Another failure. Harrow lets put a low, grating growl and digs her nails into her palms. She cannot be beaten by the first hurdle. She will not. She has ruled Drearburh undetected for nearly a decade, she opened the Locked Tomb at ten, she is a perfect necromancer bought with two hundred souls.

When she closes her eyes, she sees, again, the jolt as Pelleamena falls, the too-loud snap of her neck and the death rattle that followed. 

If Harrow fails at this first task, she may as well get some rope and finish the job right here.

Again, she summons. Again, she bleeds, and fails. The laboratory swims in front of Harrow’s eyes and her lips crack as she mutters necromantic theorems. Thanergy and thalergy, death and resurrection and doubt, all tangle up inside her until her insides are a tight knot of hate and anger and anxiety.

Harrow knows she needs to sleep. Knows it may even help, after a little rest, to come back and look at the problem anew.

She resents it all the same.

Retreating to the main room, Harrow builds herself a shell against whatever other horrors roam the basement. Teacher had been so very _florid_ in his warnings, after all, and even though she doubts his claims, it’s not wise to fail two tests in one go. Her tongue is dry and leathery as she licks blood from her lips. 

Even then, she can’t rest. Her mind is working feverishly on the problem, churning it over and over again, obsessing until it seems that every vein in her body is fizzing with anxiety.

In the end, she resorts to prayer. The only prayer she’s ever truly meant in all her desperate, stolen life.

_Please. I have to be enough. I will bleed until it is enough._

The next thing Harrow sees, as the dark breaks open, is Gideon’s face.


End file.
